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Specify Order of Output in Gallery App Results

When posting an app to the Gallery, if the app has, say, one PCXML output for the user to see, and one Excel file for the user to download, it would be helpful for to be able to specify which shows first to the user.  For example, I have a PCXML that gives the user summary tables, and instructions on how to go to the drop down above and select the second report, click on the Excel icon, and download it.  But if the Excel report shows up first, then there is no ability to give them instructions and many simply won't be savy enough to go find the PCXML in the drop down.

45 Comments
JArtNaranjo
7 - Meteor

Alteryx, please make this happen, this idea is 2 years old and I don't think is a huge coding mess. 

One of my apps, for whatever reason displays the .bat file first instead of the overview composer file I need them to see first. PLEASE, PLEASE, work on it.

JoeOrion
5 - Atom

I was able to accomplish this with the Block Until Done tool. I defined a field "Wait" that was equal to 1 then joined after the Block Until Done tool because it will make sure the first output is complete before it kicks off the second output. i did this because the gallery output section will display the first output file and then the second, then the third. and so on which allowed me to define which file flowed out first.

 

Please see the example below.

 

Capture.JPG

 

Hopefully this can help some of you with your apps

mbarone
16 - Nebula
16 - Nebula

Great idea, although I suspect that it happens to work out like that because it takes longer to output the YXDB than it does the PCXML (or whatever the Render tool is producing).

You would think that Block Until Done would not do ANY stream 2, until ALL of stream 1 is done.  That is not the case.  Block Until Done will pause stream 2 only until all records are passed to the next tool in stream 1.  In your above example, if it took 10 seconds to pass the data from Block Until Done stream 1 to the next tool (Join), but it took 35 seconds to complete the rest of stream 1; and it only took 5 seconds to complete Block Until Done stream 2 once the records are passed to that stream 1 Join, then the YXDB would be output first.

taylormcgrath
5 - Atom

It seems that the order of the dropdown of outputted files on the Gallery is alphabetical. Thus, you can name your outputs accordingly, with the default output starting with 'a'

 

image.png

lanningb
7 - Meteor
We tried that but unfortunately it is not always so. Works some times but
others they are not in order. We also tried using __ in front of files we
wanted at the top but that didn't work either.
mbarone
16 - Nebula
16 - Nebula

Unfortunately there is no way to order the outputs, whether by work around or other means. Star up this post so hopefully they'll as an option for this.

steven-barsalou
8 - Asteroid

I was just working on a solution similar to the items you guys mentioned above.  I wanted to have a message displayed to the user (from a .pcxml file) about what they should do with the output (.xls) file they were about to download.  At first I thought I could fix the PCXML display issue by:

 

1: Getting the pxml file to output prior to the .xls file

2: Make the name of the pcxml file alphabetically first, so it would sort to the top of the list and get displayed

 

I'm very disappointed to find that neither of these solutions worked.  It appears the files are first sorted by file type.  

 

Please implement something that would make either of the above two solutions work, or something more specifically designed to order the output files.  After you are done implementing this, then create an option for File Browse tools to not ask for a sheet name when an Excel file is selected.

mbarone
16 - Nebula
16 - Nebula

How about this one @apolly ?   Been a while; getting more and more stars.  Thanks!

apolly
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)
@mbarone , Thank you for staying on me and re-raising this highly-requested feature. I brought up with our engineering team lead just now and will bring the right people in the room this week. I can't commit to when we will do the work as I still need to work with UX and get a proper design for this enhancement. But again, thank you for bringing back to my attention and I will work to move this forward. For those of you that have 'starred' this post, it does matter and does help identify how frequent and annoying a particular limitation is.
mbarone
16 - Nebula
16 - Nebula

Thanks again Alex!